Fabric structural members, particularly tubular knitted and braided structural members, have been long and widely known and are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,986,033 and 4,979,280. The former discloses knit wire and braided fiberglass tubular members as well as a flat braided fiberglass member. The latter discloses the use of knit wire tubular members as cylindrical and, when flattened, planar structural members.
Flattened tubular knit wire members have significant tensile strength in longitudinal and transverse directions. By proper selection of appropriate wire material, thickness, hardness and numbers of strand ends, such members can be provided with significant longitudinal and transverse resilience. However, such flattened members have a substantially uniform thickness which limits their usefulness in some product constructions.